Perhaps I just struck a nerve.

Sure, build an orange peeling machine and it'll do great. But that's not what we're talking about here.

As for those demos videos we often see, those are very highly choreographed demonstrations. Show me a real life humanoid robot operating free form on a factor floor and doing those things and I'll be impressed.

And to be clear, this is not meant to understate what's been accomplished. I'm just saying the path for advancement is a lot harder and based in physical rather than computational limitations, which are much harder to overcome and go much slower. We simply cannot look at the growth curve of LLMs and expect robotics to advance at the same rate.

The difference is they already exist while the datacenters don't. And its a lot easier, in a democracy, to stop a thing from being built in the first place than to tear it down after the fact, what with pesky laws about private property and so forth.

Or are you really saying that if we can't solve all water usage problems then we shouldn't solve or prevent any? Is that what you're suggesting?

The problem is sensors.

There are simply no technologies today that can replicate the density, precision, and versatility of human touch sensors. Until then, there is simply no way to create generally capable robots that can operate at the level of a human.

And unlike LLMs, advancement is held back by physical limitations like materials science, so progress has been and will continue to be much slower.

Sarbanes-Oxley passed in 2002 and the number if IPOs climbed between then, in the wake of the dot-com crash, and the GFC six year later, while the median age didn't change much:

https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/IPOs-Age-of-Com...

If your claim was true you'd either expect a decline in IPOs or the age of those companies going up and neither is true during that period.

Now to be clear I'm not saying changes in regulation had no impact. Rather my claim is that regulations plus monetary policy and other macro effects fundamentally changed the structure of the market itself, thereby deincentivizing going public, rather than somehow acting as a break or barrier to IPOs.

If you consider that part of a "culture war", then it seems that term has lost all meaning. Might as well just accuse me of being "woke" and get it over with.

The entire damn deal we make when a company goes public is that the company can raise money from a much broader, potentially less sophisticated investor base that don't have to be accredited, etc, and in exchange there are more stringent requirements around reporting and so forth.

So sure, we could just throw away that regulatory and social contract, but at that point the public market serves no purpose.

Care to be more specific? "Regulations bad" is a pretty common platitude around here but you've stated your main thesis, here, without a hint of support to back it.

My observation is that the glut of available private credit has meant for at least 15 years you could just raise funds from those markets, and that's the ultimate reason IPOs have become less common.

This hasn't made it "impossible" for companies to go public. It just eliminated the need. If you can raise billions of dollars in a G round why go to the public markets at all?

Because if this a case of "well you use a computer so you're part of the system, man" then I probably won't waste my time. Cynical fatalism usually involves moving goalposts IME.

Making things previously impossible possible? That's the business I joined.

Destroying people's livelihoods without care for the consequences while pursuing monopolies, capturing the value as rent seekers, and ultimately enshittifying entire industries?

Yeah, no, I know I didn't sign up for that, thanks.

And if you're thinking "wait that's not AI". Yes. That's precisely what these companies are trying to do.

https://www.wired.com/1997/09/apple-kills-clone-market/

That said, in the entrepreneurial space it's less clear to me this is true. In a team setting? Sure. But the C-suite of a business isn't necessarily a team sport and a lot of wildly successful CEOs are notoriously pieces of shit including Gates, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, and many others.

That is, it appears to tacitly agree with, and chide IBM for failing to defended, closed, walled-garden ecosystems.

That's certainly not what it seems they meant. It's just how one might initially read it and downvote.

A more appropriate analogy for what you just described might be writing vs ghost writing.

But it's certainly not handwriting vs typewriter.

Note: there's no implied value judgement here.

My point is that the analogy that LLMs are equivalent to typewriters is fundamentally broken. Using an LLM to create text, and writing using writing tools, are simply completely different activities that just happen to lead to (at least superficially) the same outcomes.

Similarly, downloading a vase and 3D printing it isn't the same as making pottery. Programming a knitting machine to make socks for you isn't knitting. Putting text on paper using a printer isn't calligraphy.

And I'd argue we're going to collectively conclude that assembling software systems using AI isn't coding.

Again: no value judgement. But life isn't always just about outcomes. Process does, in fact, matter, and I think it's important we maintain these distinctions.

It's genuinely amazing and baffling to me that a non-trivial number of people around here don't seem to grok that.

This is something someone only familiar with writing code for general purpose devices or higher level languages can't imagine. But when you're building for one very specific hardware platform you can tailor your code to that platform in ways that simply aren't possible when building for portability.

Bafflement? Certainly.

Maybe a little sadness at the lack of understanding of, or appreciation for, the creative process? Sure.

Outrage? Nah.